Your Holiness, Meet Adam Smith

The Times (UK) Online has an opinion piece by William Rees-Mogg containing the following advice for the next Pope: "Before you take the new job, your holiness, read a little Adam Smith":

IN THE next couple of weeks, the cardinals will elect a new pope. He will be a holy man because the cardinals understand the nature of prayer; he will have been a capable bishop, because the cardinals understand the nature of Church administration; he will have a powerful personality, if not as charismatic as that of Pope John Paul II. It is unlikely that the same lightning will strike the papacy twice running.

What more can one say about his likely views? The next pope will be a socialist; no doubt a democratic socialist, but a socialist all the same. Almost every cardinal and bishop in the Roman Catholic Church, and probably every bishop in the Anglican Church, is a socialist. They are socialists in the same sense as Tony Blair, or Gerhard Schröder, or Jacques Chirac, or Bill Clinton. They are all socialists because they have never studied the liberal argument. That is a pity; liberalism may not be enough, but it is the basis of our culture.

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I have been thinking how to put this right, a small task of conversion of a largely socialist world. I thought first of the next pope. I’ve often noticed that bishops, of all Christian denominations, have never read Adam Smith, but know intuitively that they disagree with him. My first thought, therefore, was that I might send a copy of The Wealth of Nations as an inaugural present to the next pope, whoever he might be.

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My Comments:
For those unfamiliar with the terminology, when Rees-Mogg refers to "liberalism" in this piece, he's not talking about American-style big government liberalism; he's talking about "classical liberalism", or what we in the States would refer to as "free-market" economic conservatism.

And he certainly may be right that the Church hierarchy is sorely lacking in understanding the benefits of free economies. But Rees-Mogg should also be willing to acknowledge the shortcomings of the free market - and the effect of these shortcomings on vulnerable populations - with which the Church rightly concerns itself.

So, while I agree that the Vatican could use a healthy dose of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, I also think that the vast majority of classical liberal free marketers could benefit from a healthy dose of the late Holy Father's 1991 encyclical, Centesimus Annus, which cautions against the excesses of capitalism deprived of moral guidance, and governed solely by consumerism.

UPDATE:
See the discussion on this topic over at Amy Welborn's blog.

For a real-world example, see The Conservative Case Against Wal-Mart at the Mirror of Justice blog.